As part of 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN', CPS x LIFTA presents a LOVE & INTIMACY video series. Over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing short films that center intergenerational outlooks on love and intimacy in Palestine and the diaspora, with discussions highlighting—but not limited to— disconnects, desires, relationships, trauma, teaching, learning, and beyond. This series includes intimate interviews and conversations held between Palestinians who share a close relationship, including old friends, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, lovers, cousins, and more.

Conversations explore what has been inherited and what is being shed, as well as the ways in which taking care of ourselves and each other is to care for the collective—now and into the future. Dialogue moves beyond topics of love in the human-to-human sense, extending to the deep connections one shares with an object, time, smell, memory, land, and ritual.

In this episode, we meet Noel, 26, and Layan, 31. Noel is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Layan lives in Montreal. The pair met through Instagram two years ago, though they describe their relationship as one that evokes the feeling of ‘kicking it with an old friend’. In this conversation, they discuss memes as a love language, navigating and accepting a multilayered identity, finding community through social media, making space for dialogue around trauma and the mundane, the gaps between their own healing processes and their parents, and how their friendship helps them to validate themselves and their experiences.